Showing posts with label Courthouses of the West. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Courthouses of the West. Show all posts

Tuesday, November 1, 2022

Courthouses of the West: Vote No on the Proposed Amendment B to the Wyoming Constitution

Courthouses of the West: Vote No on the Proposed Amendment B to the Wyoming...

Vote No on the Proposed Amendment B to the Wyoming Constitution.


Let's get political for a second.

Oh no, you are likely thinking, isn't this blog dedicated to architecture and the like? Sure, it crosses over into the law itself, from time to time, but . . . 

Well, yes, we're departing from our normal programming to bring you this public service announcement.

And in doing so, I'll note, I'm typing this just a couple of days out of the hospital, too beat up from surgery to go back into the office yet.  

More on that later.

On November 8th when you go to the polls, you will be voting on Constitutional Amendment B, which would increase the mandatory retirement age of Wyoming Supreme Court justices and District Court judges from 70 to 75.  Circuit Court judges are not subject to a mandatory retirement age, oddly.

The Wyoming State Bar doesn't have an official position on it, but it's pretty clear that its unofficial position is vote yes.  The Chief Justice of the Wyoming Supreme Court, who can openly come out on such matters, has, and her position is yes.

Vote No.

First, let's look at some material just released by the Wyoming State Bar.

Okay, there you have it.

Now, before we go on, let's note that the average Wyomingite is 38 years old, and that Wyoming is an "old" state.  So, even as a state whose population is routinely analyzed as getting older and older, it's still less than 40 years of age.

Keep that in mind.

So the arguments in favor of raising the judicial retirement age?  Well, as we all know, all Americans live free of bodily defect brought on by age, illness, or decline in mental faculties until they're 102 years old.

Right?

Not hardly.

Back the above reference to the hospital

This was my view for the last week.  It's a view of the mountain, between the parking garage and an administrative building belonging to the hospital.

I took the photo from here.

I'm out now.

I was in as I had a robotic right colectomy.  In other words, I had a large (very large) polyp in my large intestine that had to be removed.  I learned this was there when I went in for a colonoscopy. This was the following surgery.

This turned out to be a bigger deal. . . a much bigger deal, than I wanted to admit it was.  In my mind, I wanted to pretend that it would be in and out, or at least I'd be out by Friday.  Nope.  I did get out on Saturday, but I'm feeling rather beat up, and it's clear that it's going to take several days to get back to normal.

Army with two IV hookups.  I had two, as I was so dehydrated when I came in, they had a very difficult time finding my veins.

I am on the mend now, however.

I ignored the current advice, which is to go in for a scope at age 50.  You really should, and my failure to do so caused me to end up with this, probably. If I hadn't had this, I probably would have died from this right about the same time my father died from something sort of related, if not perfectly related.  So my life has probably been extended by modern medicine, just like the State Bar notes has generally been the case society wide.

So the State Bar is right, right?

Well, only so far as people now "live longer" as things like colon cancer don't go undetected as much as they once did, so people tend not to die of them. We don't even think of death's like that as natural deaths, whereas at one time, we pretty much did. There's a reason, after all, that in the Middle Ages people prayed for "good deaths".  Dying from colon cancer isn't a good death.

But living a "long", by historical standards, life doesn't mean living one free of deterioration of some sort.  It's been often noted that in recent decades the incidents of dementia have been increasing, with seemingly little public understanding that the reason for this is tied directly to longer lives.  Probably the incidents of cirrhosis of the liver have increased markedly since the Middle Ages as well, in spite of the huge amount of alcohol consumed at the time, for the simple fact that if you die when you are 40 years old you aren't likely to die by that means, in spite of your diet, as compared to its impact as you age past that point.  Lavran is well portrayed as aged at the time of his death in Kristin Lavransdatter when he's probably not even 50, or just over it.  Kristin is probably right about 50 when she dies.  The book is a fictional work, of course, but an extraordinarily well researched novel. It catches that earlier era well.

Put another way, by extending the retirement ages of lawyers up, we're guaranteeing that the percentage of them that experience mental decline while in office also goes up.  There's no doubt about it.

We're also guaranteeing that the average age of jurists will incline upwards, and their years on the bench will extend.

I've already noted that the median age in Wyoming is 38 years old.  Anyone in business of any kind knows that the post Baby Boom generations, Gen, X, Gen Y, the Millennials, and Generation Jones, do not have the same views and attitudes that Baby Boomers do.  For some period of time, Boomers expressed some contempt of that fact in regard to younger generations, and in more recent years younger generations have expressed contempt back.  Perhaps missed in all of this is that younger generations have had a much harder time with much more limited resources than the Boomers have, with that generation being the most privileged in American history.  This is not to pit one generation against another, but rather to point out that a person presiding in judgement over another ought to at least have some appreciation of where that younger person is coming from and what their experiences have been.

Indeed, here's where the points made by the Bar's information sheet actually cut the other way.  It notes:
By 2030, 9.5% of the civilian labor force is projected to be older than 65.

Citing for authority, the following:

Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor, The Economics Daily, Number of people 75 and older in the labor force is expected to grow 96.5 percent by 2030 at https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2021/number-of-people-75-and-older-in-the-labor-force-is-expected-to-grow-96-5-percent-by-2030.htm (visited June 06, 2022).

We'd note at first, that's not necessarily a good thing.  That we've now returned to a condition in which the elderly have to keep working isn't a sign of a healthy economic environment, bur rather potentially the opposite. The population of the elderly working increasing society wide may mean they have to, not that they want to.  

And beyond that, these are figures for the US as a whole, not Wyoming in particular.

Be that as it may, even on its face, it means that over 90% of the workforce, is age 65 or younger.

The Bar's sheet also unintentionally pointed out by something additionally cuts the other way:
Mandatory judicial retirement at age 70 has resulted in the loss of many eminently qualified Justices and Judges in Wyoming, including Justice Michael K. Davis, Justice Michael Golden, Judge Timothy Day, and Judge Thomas Sullins to name a few. If the mandatory retirement age were extended, not only could these members of the judiciary continue to meaningfully contribute to the law in Wyoming, longer service would also result in a net savings for the State.
First of all, these individuals were not "lost", they're all still living.   While not mentioned in this list (which must be sort of deflating to them), I can easily think of four retired judges who are now mediators and arbitrators, at least one of whom is heavily called upon in that role. So, rather than losing them, we simply employed them, or they chose to employ themselves, in another role.

Additionally, each one of these jurists had a seat which was not abandoned, but occupied by a younger lawyer.  At least one of the individuals mentioned retired years ago, and his replacement is now long serving.  Why are we suggesting that he's some sort of flop?  That is exactly, however, what this suggests, untrue though it would be.

Additionally, like to say, of course, that we're a nation of laws, not of men, but those laws are filtered through the experiences and eyes of men, no matter how a person might wish to believe it.  The economic concerns, for example, of average Americans in their late 20s in the 2020s, who push marriage off for financial considerations, who have lived with their parents longer than any generation since World War Two, and whose attachment to careers are less stable, as the careers themselves are less stable, are considerably different than those for people who came of age in the 70s, when simply having a college degree meant while collar employment.

Experience, of course, counts, as we often here, but so does over experience.  Staying in a place, including an occupation, too long will bring about some sort of stagnation.  This is true in all things.  Spots coaching, where a sort of rough rule of the jungle applies, provides an interesting example. Like the law, the occupation exist geared toward producing a definitive result, so perhaps it's analogous in more ways than one.

In the NFL, for example, the same being an institution which Americans regard as sacrosanct, the two oldest coaches are 70 years of age, before the ages all drop down to less than 65.  The tenth-oldest coach is only 54.  Only one MLB manager is over 70 years of age.  The oldest NBA coach is 73, but in second position is one that's 65.

Another example might be the military, with it sometimes being noted that some aspects of the law are in fact substitutes for private warfare.  For officers, the most analogous group, the following is provided:

CHAPTER 63—RETIREMENT FOR AGE

Sec.1251.Age 62: regular commissioned officers in grades below general and flag officer grades; exceptions. 
1252.Age 64: permanent professors at academies. 
1253.Age 64: regular commissioned officers in general and flag officer grades; exception. 
1263.Age 62: warrant officers..
62 years of age, with exceptions up to 64.

Finally, we might also wish to note, the cost of passing this amendment is opportunity costs, in terms of lost opportunities, for the profession.  Recent appointees to the bench have been relatively young, often being in their 40s if in their 40s.  These individuals will already occupy these positions for up to three decades, meaning that they will fill them to the exclusion of other, also qualified, individuals.  While some may be great judges, we can never hope for that, and if most judges are adequate judges we are doing well.  What we do know, however, is that some great judges will never get to be that, as their chance will be taken up by the aged.  Lawyers who in their late 40s and early 50s still have a chance of being judges will lose that chance as occupants of the bench stay on, with everyone knowing that no matter how respected a lawyer may be, nobody is going to choose them for a judicial position after they are in their late 50s.

The one and only reason, therefore, to pass this amendment is the cost savings one noted by the State Bar, but that's a bad reason.  It reduces this, like so many other things in American life, to dollars and cents to serve economic interests alone.  The logical extension of it is simply to discourage retirement in general, something the larger American society in fact already does.

Vote no on Amendment B.

Monday, August 15, 2022

Courthouses of the West: Laramie, Albany County, Wyoming. First "Woman Jury" Memorial.

Courthouses of the West: Laramie, Albany County, Wyoming. First "Woman Jury" Memorial.

Laramie, Albany County, Wyoming. First "Woman Jury" Memorial.

Memorial, MKTH photograph.

Accurate information on this event is actually fairly difficult to find.   The trial was the First Degree Murder trial of Andrew W. Howie.  The prosecutor, Albany County Attorney Stephen Downey, had only been in that role for a few months and objected to the women being seated as jurors, but was overruled by the Court, which held that as women had been granted the franchise in Wyoming, they also had the right to sit in juries.  Downey's objection was based on social convention, rather than the law.

Contrary to the way it is sometimes recounted, the jury was not all female, but half male and half female, with six women jurors.  It returned a verdict finding Mr. Howie guilty of manslaughter, which must have been included as a lessor offense in the charges.  The trial convinced Downey who in turn became a champion of women's suffrage.

This memorial is not at the Albany County Courthouse, but at the downtown railroad park.  Judicial proceedings in Laramie were originally held in a store at that location.

(Photo and reasearch by MKTH).

Friday, June 24, 2022

Courthouses of the West: 2022 United States Supreme Court Watch

Courthouses of the West: 2022 United States Supreme Court Watch

2022 United States Supreme Court Watch

This June/July promises to be one in which a whole boatload of major rulings are set to be handed down.

Given that, while we've never had a trailing thread of any kind here before, we're going to track a few of the bigger ones this year.

June 23, 2022

The first of the claims that will be big and controversial.

In 6-3 ruling, court strikes down New York’s concealed-carry law

Here's the text:

New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen.

Note, this opinion, combined with the descent, is of epic length.

I haven't reviewed this fully, but apparently what it holds is that a state can't require a party wishing to carry concealed, or just to carry, to prove a particular need to do so.

Monday, April 25, 2022

Monday at the Bar: Courthouses of the West: Denver County Courthouse, Denver Colorado.

Courthouses of the West: Denver County Courthouse, Denver Colorado.

Denver County Courthouse, Denver Colorado.

This is the Denver County Courthouse, which houses the district, county and city courts in Denver, Colorado.

 

The downtown courthouse was built in 1902 and is a very impressive structure.  

Wednesday, January 26, 2022

Courthouses of the West: Justice Stephen Breyer To Retire.

Courthouses of the West: Justice Stephen Breyer To Retire.

Justice Stephen Breyer To Retire.

Just when you thought the news wasn't tense enough. . . Russians looming over Ukraine. . . PRC looming over Taiwan. . . the mid term election. . . a baseball lockout. . . 


Justice Stephen Breyer decides to retire.

Uff.

Well, off to a titanic nomination spat with a 50/50 divided Senate.

The filibuster, however, won't apply, so the Democrats, assuming they can all agree on the replacement nominee, will get somebody in.  They key will be satisfying the moderate Democrats, although they are few in number.

Breyer, a 1964 Harvard law graduate, was appointed to the Court by Bill Clinton in 1994.  He was principally a government attorney early in his career before becoming a Harvard professor in 1967, although he took time out from that pursuit to engage in government service from time to time, including serving as a Watergate prosecutor.  He was an expert on administrative law.  He went on the bench in 1980.

Breyer had one of those legal careers that's both enviable and deceptive.  Undoubtedly highly intelligent, he actually practiced real law very little, spending no time whatsoever in private practice and the most of his career in academia or on the bench.  Of some slight interest, in his early legal career, 1964 and 1965, he was completing eight years in the Army Reserve, from which he left as a corporal.

Beyer, who is 83, has been under enormous pressure to retire due to Democratic fears that if he does not do so prior to the November election and should then pass away, certain a possibility at his advanced age, his replacement would not get through a Republican Senate or would be nominated by a Republican President.

Monday, January 3, 2022

Courthouses of the West: 2021 Reflections. The Legal Edition

Courthouses of the West: 2021 Reflections. The Legal Edition

2021 Reflections. The Legal Edition

This blog has been so slow that a person would be justified in believing its a dead blog.

It isn't, it has COVID 19.

Allow me to explain 

It was already the case that 2019 was an odd year, legal wife, for the journalist here.  The reason for that was that my schedule was such that I did very little traveling.  The last new courthouse (keeping in mind that I don't take photos of courthouses I've already taken, was in Fallon County, Montana.

Fallon County Courthouse, Baker Montana

There's no way on Earth when I took those that I anticipated there wouldn't be any new courthouses appearing later that year.  

And yet there were not.

2020 would have been different, but in late 2019 the news that a new disease was loose in Asia hit.  By January, there were pretty clear signs that something was frightening about it.

January is, of course, Tet, or similar holidays in Asia.  I.e, the Lunar New Year.  It's a big deal and in spite of the imposition of Communism on Asian societies, they still celebrate it.  The Lunar New Year caused Asians to travel all over their own countries and all over the globe.  Easter and Christmas do the same in the West.  The combined impacts of all those holidays sent people moving all over, and the disease was soon global.  Living through it at the time, it seemed to hit Italy first, but who really knows.  

Anyhow, by March things were shutting down.  Trials I had scheduled that summer were cancelled. Courts shuttered their doors.

And Zoom came in.

Now, in January 2022 we're looking at the rapid spread of the Omicron variant of COVID 19.  It's going to close some things somewhere.  It's inevitable.

And even if it's milder, it's effectively the last blow in how the litigators do business.  Things are never going back to the way they were before.

In 2021, I did four trials.  Two of them had some kind of mask mandate in place.  Every courthouse is different.  Depositions have largely gone over to Zoom, and they don't ever appear likely to go back to being live and in person.  Lots of hearing are now by Microsoft Teams.

Ironically, even though I spent a week in a really beautiful courthouse in another state, I'd note, I failed to take a single photograph of it. 

An evolution towards electronic appearances in things was occurring before COVID 19, but the pandemic pushed things over the edge and fully into the electronic world.  I really don't like it, and I don't like what it will likely mean for the law either.  I'm lucky to have principally practiced before it occurred.

2020 and 2021 saw the best and the worst of lawyers in spades, which is something we should note before moving on.  For the worst, lawyers working for the Trump Administration or affiliated with it were full participants in a plot to illegally retain power for the ex President.  It's shameful.  

For the best, most lawyers didn't participate in that or approve of it. The Court system itself really rose to the occasion and kept the coup from working.  Lawyers in at least one state wrote a letter to their Senator, also a lawyer, flatly demanding that the Senator retract the Senator's position in regard to the coup, which the Senator did not do.  It was a brave thing for them to do.

One thing that Trump accomplished that was a real accomplishment (and frankly its Mitch McConnell's accomplishment) was to bring in a set of Supreme Court Justices who actually apply the law as written.

Much of our current problems with huge political polarization stem in fact from the capture of the highest courts by the political left in the mid 20th Century.  The courts of that period were perfectly comfortable with creating new rights out of thin air and foisting them on the public, when the public wouldn't have supported them democratically. That partially lead to a right wing belief that the left was anti-democratic and involved in what some regarded as a slow moving left wing coup.  When one camp drops a belief in democracy, the other will follow sooner or later.

We've finally gotten past the US. Supreme Court acting like a super legislature of Platonic Elders.  It was long overdue.  That's gong to be painful for a few years, but perhaps it helps us get back to where we always should have been.  Big social issues ought to be decided in legislatures, not in courts.

Let's  take a look at the upcoming year and therefore put out a few, a very few, resolutions for the field of law.  Most of these we have little hope of being carried out, which doesn't mean that we shouldn't state them anyway.

1.  End the UBE

The UBE has proven to be a failure.  It's mostly aided the exportation of legal jobs from states with smaller economies and communities to neighboring ones with larger economies and communities, something now aided by electronic practice.  It's made the standard of practice more uniform, by making it more uniformly bad.

The UBE ought to go, or a local state bar reinstated where it exists. For that matter, its time for residency requirements to come back on.

2.  Quite with the bad legal reporting

If you listen to the news, any news, you'll get the impression that the justices of the United States Supreme Court act like a session of World Wide Wrestling every time they meet. That's far from true.

The vast majority of U.S. Supreme Court decisions are heavily one-sided.  I.e., 9 to 0, or 8 to 1 decisions are much more common than 5 to 4.  In the last session, for example, Justice Sotomayor issues and opinion in a criminal case that accused the lower court of ignoring the plain language of a statute. She was writing for the majority.

You never hear stuff like that.

That's mostly because in an average year there's maybe one or two. . . or no, cases that are actually interesting from the Press's prospective.  And those are the ones that tend to be lopsided.  It gives a skewed prospective on the court.

3.  Age matters

I've been saying this for a while, but its disconcerting that the Federal bench has no mandatory retirement age.  

I'm not saying that any Federal judge I've ever encountered seemed impaired. Far from it. But courts belong to the people, and the median age for the people is a lot lower than the upper reaches of the Federal bench. That matters.  

For that matter, I think the state mandatory retirement age for judges ought to be depressed.  It's 70 now, and there was a move in the legislature a few years ago to raise, or remove, it.  I think it ought to be lowered to 65.  Frankly, I'd prefer it being lowered to 60. Again, not because I have a problem with a current judge, but people are younger than that, as a rule.

And at some point this is going to catch up with us.  

This applies, I think, to lawyers as well.  Age takes its toll. Age also narrows us, and we tend to end up our occupations.  Both are bad potentialities.

4.  Wider net

Recently one of the Bar Commissioners noted that a state Supreme Court justice had expressed concern over a lack of applicants for judicial positions.  I'm frankly not surprised that there has been.

Part of this may reflect a disturbing trend in general.  In what most of us thought was the late stage of COVID (it might not have been, as we now know) the press started reporting on the Great Resignation.  Now some are doubting that this is occurring, but at least in the legal field it seems that the Great Hesitation is operating.  I'll post about that in general in one of our companion blogs, but anyone in the legal field anywhere knows that younger lawyers are seemingly just not entering practice right now  I don't know what they're going, frankly  Some that are, are job hopping rapidly.  One judicial law clerk I became somewhat familiar with in another state was on her fourth job as a clerk, and second clerkship, and had only been working for less than two years.

Anyhow, one thing that seems to have gone on for the last few state administrations here is selecting judicial applicants based on certain criteria that were set out, publically or silently, which is fine and makes sense as, after all, it's a political appointment.  That was a change from some prior administrations, however, which took a broader view.  Anyhow, after this being the case for a long time, I think certain private practitioner categories have simply quit applying as it was obvious that they weren't going to be admitted.  

A wider net needs to be cast.

On that, one thing the judicial nomination committee used to be able to do, although I don't know if it still can, was to submit names of its own choosing.  At least one judge in the southeaster part of the state became the judge that way.  He was completely surprised by his own nomination and struggled with it at first as it meant a big reduction in income.  He accepted the position as he felt it was his duty.  If the committee can't do that, it ought to have that power restored and actually use it.

Monday, November 15, 2021

Courthouses of the West: The Lamp: Gerald Russello, R.I.P.

Courthouses of the West: The Lamp: Gerald Russello, R.I.P.

The Lamp: Gerald Russello, R.I.P.

There hasn't been a photo of a courthouse put up here in well over a year.  I missed my opportunity to do that, fragrantly, when I tried a case in the State of Colorado's Denver District Court a couple of months ago.  I spent the whole week in and around the courthouse and never took a photograph of it. 

In my slight defense, I couldn't remember if I'd photographed it before, from the outside.  I had not.  I should have, just as a precaution.  And because it's a beautiful courthouse, and because I was also inside it, which I hadn't been.

I was busy, and just didn't.  

It's a shame to, as the courthouse in and of itself gives us a real view of how things were in the law, and how they now are.  

As odd as that may seem, that's my introduction for a blog post I'm linking in here, which is the following.

I suggest you read the post.  It's about somebody who was obviously very decent.

Normally I wouldn't post that here.  If I were to do so, it would be on one of our companion blogs, but I'm doing this here as lawyers work in courthouses and well it just feels like it should be here.

Part of the reason the last photograph of a courthouse that was put up here is so long ago has to do with COVID 19.  The last photo was in February 2019.  Now, there weren't any from February for the rest of that year either, so its not all due to COVID 19. Truth be known, I've taken photos of nearly every courthouse in Wyoming, with two exceptions I can think of, and there are very few let in the state to photograph as a result.  I was also taking a lot of photographs of out of state courthouses, but I had a lull in travel to new places in 2019 and then 2020 effectively was the year of no travel.  Indeed, I haven't been on an airplane since some time in 2019, due to COVID 19.  It's been a huge change in my work habits.  

And not only in mine, but in everyone's.  Now some lawyers are so acclimated to Zoom depositions they'll take nothing else.  I had hoped that would go away, as I hate them.  It shows no signs of doing so, however.  We may be stuck with Zoom depos and the age of lawyer travel may be over forever. It'll probably sound odd for me to say it, as I'm not a natural traveler, but I miss that part of the practice.

Anyhow, another thing I've really been noticing since COVID 19 is the decline, and changes, at least in my view, in all sorts of things law related.  Some people are having a really hard time simply resuming work.  Finding new lawyers to come to work for a firm has become increasingly difficult and some young lawyers don't seem to want to really work at all, at not least in private practice.  

And I've become disgusted with lawyer hypocrisy.

On the day I read this, which is to say today, I already read the news about a lawsuit being filed which contains a lie.  I know one of the lawyers associated with that complaint, and back when we were in law school that lawyer would have dismissed any concept that they'd file a suit containing a lie, but now its happened.  I'm not going further into it, but this sort of thing is appalling.

Just the other day I sat through a CLE in which another lawyer I know made a statement about how lawyers are essentially the guardians of society and advance what needs to be advanced in society.  After a year in which plenty of lawyers were associated with an effort to advance a political fabrication, that's at least open to question, but at the same time, the courts deserve enormous praise, and they're part of the law, for keeping that from occurring. The legal profession can and should be really proud of that while, at the same time, we should be deeply ashamed of those members of our profession who acted in an antidemocratic manner.

Also at that CLE I heard another lawyer speak about how he became a lawyer as he loved cross-examination.  I don't know if I buy that.  How would you know if you loved cross examination if you weren't a lawyer already?  It's like claiming you love saudero tacos if you've only ever had Taco Bell.  Come on.  Anyhow, that sort of thing gets to me.

I've tried lots of cases over the years, but it bothers me when people claim they love destroying people on the stand.  I've done it, and I've seen it done.  Recalling it as a war story is one thing, but to claim you love it in the abstract is quite another.  It's a skill, like argument is for a lawyers, and like killing is for soldiers.  A person needs to be cautious about what the claim to love. The day we took Hill 502 is one thing, the other thing is something else.

All of which gets me to this.

I don't know who Gerald Russello was and I don't know Morgan Pino is.  But as expressed in this article, they're decent human beings, and maybe even better than decent human beings. They're the way that lawyers ought to be.

Monday, September 24, 2018

Monday, June 18, 2018

Chief Justice James Burke to retire

Wyoming Supreme Court Chief Justice James Burke is retiring.


Justice Burke has been on the Wyoming Supreme Court since 2005 and has been Chief Justice since 2014.  This seems amazing to me as I well recall Justice Burke as a District Court Judge of the 2nd Judicial District and that doesn't seem that long ago.  I guess it is.

Justice Burke is not a native Wyomingite, which wouldn't be that remarkable in general except that the legal profession in the state is heavily made up of natives.  He came to Wyoming due to his service in the Vietnam War era United States Air Force as he was stationed in Cheyenne's F. E. Warren AFB.  After receiving his discharge from the USAF he went to law school

Just Burke has been a good Chief Justice and he'll be missed.  He was appointed to the Wyoming Supreme Court by Governor Freudenthal and he is the last justice on the Court who was not appointed by Governor Mead.  His departure means that starting in early 2019 all of the Justices on the Wyoming Supreme Court will have been appointed by Governor Mead.

Monday, January 1, 2018

The State Of The Blogs

Ladies and Gentlemen. . . the Blogger!


(Riotous Cheering)

Thank you, thank you.  . . 

I'd like to report to you that, today on the Dawn of 2018, the State of the Blogs is good.

(Applause).

We saw all time viewing records this year, peaking out at 55,954 views in the month of March alone. That was a peak however, and it matched the end of the posts on the Punitive Expedition. After a steady rise in March, 2016, that coincided with our commencement of posts about the Punitive Expedition, which saw readership jump up to nearly 5,000 views in a month, readership really took off and steady climbed until that month.  As a result, this blog has now had over 560,000 total views.

Of course, it's dropped off like a stone, somewhat, since then, which was expected. After March, readership was down to 10,000 views per month by June, still pretty respectable by the historic standards of this blog, but way, way down.  However, for some odd reason, it had doubled to 20,000 views per month by October, fell to 12,000 the next month, before going to the second highest readership of all time last month, 38,000. Weird.  It's expected to drop way off in 2018.  My guess is that we'll be luck to get 200 views a day, and a lot of days right now it's down that low or lower.

Part of the reason is that we're past most of the daily entries about the Punitive Expedition, which have been followed by frequent ones about World War One. These will not be coming nearly as fast, we think, as the slice of life aspect of these depart a bit . But we suspect they will.  And that will likely result in fewer posts.

Indeed, the pace of posting has already declined this past week as we move towards this new phase, or perhaps somewhat return a bit to the older original one (okay, we've said that before).  Indeed, the tally of posts over the years tells its own story in these regards:
As we've noted here before, this blog had an earlier version, so the tallies are more than a bit off (including the tally of readership hits), but this tells its own tale.  Posting here really began to pick up when we killed off that earlier blog, took a hiatus from posting, and then picked up posting here.  But we've simply been writing more.  This year nearly matched last year, but it was higher.  The year before that saw an increase in posts that was quite significant, although 2015 was actually down from 2014.  Chances are pretty high that 2018 will drop down from 2017 and 2017 is likely to cap out as the all time high in terms of posts here. Having said that, 2018 is another election year, like 2016 was, that contributed to a lot of posts being made here.

The Somme viewed from the air, January 19, 1917

 For reasons that aren't clear to us, this is the most viewed thread on the site, having received 5,293 views.

Lex Anteinternet, our most diverse blog, is only one of our several blogs, of course, and looking at them tells a different tale.  Our older blog, Holscher's Hub, was way down in posts over historic highs:
Indeed, it was at its lowest ever, if we discount the inaugural year of 2011.  We hope to see more posts there this year.  It hit its historic highly monthly viewing, however, last month, at 3,000 views . . which suggest it was something on the net, rather than our brilliant content,t hat contributed to that.  Once the most viewed of our blogs, it stands today at a respectable 64,533 total views, which increase at the rate of about 1,000 or so a month, surprisingly, given the low posting rate there.

Today In Wyoming's History should be way down, but oddly it isn't.  This may be because when we started updating this post nearly daily due to the Punitive Expedition we linked those posts to Wyoming newspapers to try to give a Wyoming flavor and Wyoming view to those posts.  More particularly, we wanted to try to explore, as part of the original purpose of this blog, what it was like for Wyomingite's in 1916 when things tarted hearing up on the Mexican border in a major way.  As we did that, we linked those items into Today In Wyoming's History and updated a lot of entries, indeed sometimes on a daily basis.  Beyond that we posted some new items as well.  We kept that up to an extent in 2017 as we posted newspaper items and daily events concerning 1917.

Perhaps in part because of that, the readership steadily claimed all year and peaked at over 6,000 views last month, although as we've been noting here it seems that a lot of that was due to net activity.  Today In Wyoming's History now has over 114,000 views, making it the second most viewed of our blogs.

New Mexicans In Wyoming

 Most recent original entry on Today In Wyoming's History.

Churches of the West, which has historically stood next in line, also saw a big decline in postings this past year:
Quite the drop off, but then this one drops around a lot.  As its based on my travel for work, it doesn't get much new if I keep traveling to the same places. And frankly, I've run out of subjects in Wyoming to post to it, almost.   At over 71,000 views, it stands in second place to this blog for readership and jumps around wildly from month to month, getting between 1,500 views and 2,500 views per month.

Immaculate Conception Church, Rapid City South Dakota

A portion of the most popular thread on Churches of the West at 3,696 views.

Courthouses of the West tells a similar tale this year.  It usually gets about 500 views a month (which is surprisingly high given the low activity rate), but freakishly jumped to an all time high of 1600 last month (hmmmm. . . . ).  There was nearly no posting on it at all in 2017:

Again, as t his is a travel based blog, this reflects the fact that last year I rarely went to a location that I hadn't photographed before or, if I was in an unfamiliar place, I just didn't' have time to take photos (an increasingly common work phenomenon).  So, not much going on there.  I'm amazed that the blog has 26,000 total views.

Lawrence County Courthouse. Speerfish South Dakota.

 Last post of the year for Courthouses of the West.

Painted Bricks is the first of our specialty blogs here about structures.  It originally was focused on a single location, but rather obviously branched out pretty quickly.  It's readership has always been low, but it saw a surprising hike last month as well, and also in August (probably due to the eclipse).   It usually is the least active of the specialty blogs, but last year it was not, which doesn't mean it was very active:
Somehow its managed to receive nearly 28,000 views.

Hotel Virginia (Natrona County Annex), Casper Wyoming

 Most popular, and now out of date, post on Painted Bricks with 1,029 views.

A revived blog, The Aerodrome, focusing on aircraft, is in at over 7,000 total views and its just a few months old.  Half of that came in December, suggesting that net activity had more to do with its total readership so far than any other single cause.  We like airplanes, so we hope to see more activity here.

Maybe Berlin Airlift Rates were achieved.

Part of the Eclipse post at The Aerodrome, our most recent blog, or not.

Our other transportation blog, Railhead, remained about as active, which isn't much, as always:

Sunrise Train, Torrington Wyoming

Last post of the year for Railhead
 
This is frankly surprising as this is also a travel based blog.  I'm amazed that there were fifteen posts on it last year.  I"m also amazed that it has had a grand total of 32,000 views. 

Finally, there's our low activity blog on war memorials.  Well, that blog, Some Gave All, is now on memorials of all types, showing how everything here expands all the time.  It's also travel based and highly opportunistic, meaning that I pick things up for that blog as I pass them, and I pass by things I could photograph constantly, and I do mean constantly.  Given that, the fact that its totals every year remain about the same is not too surprising:

It has 47,550 total views, which is really surprising.

Veterans Memorial, Ft. Laramie Wyoming

Snippet of the last post of the year from Some Gave All.

Well, we can't really say "finally", as we took a run at expanding out the number of blogs a bit to reflect the somewhat bogus expansion of some of the existing one.  Along those lines, we planned oan  Churches of the South and Churches of the East. We have the URLs for both, but only the East has been posted.

Churches of the West: Anglican Church of the Holy Trinity, Toronto Ontario

Not much is going on there yet, and for good reason. Every photo posted there is already posted elsewhere.  Whether this activity will be worth doing is yet to be seen.

So, the state of the blogs is good, and we've received a lot of viewership this year.  We'd guess that it'll never be anywhere near as high in any one year as it has been for 2017, and that's okay.  We'd also guess that the posting rate will be down, and indeed if you tally all the blogs up together, it already is. But that's okay too.

Thanks for stopping in and reading our entries from time to time. We appreciate it.

Monday, October 31, 2016

Monday at the Bar: Courthouses of the West: Jefferson County Courthouse, Port Arthur Texas.

Courthouses of the West: Jefferson County Courthouse, Port Arthur Texas.:


This is the courthouse for Jefferson County, Texas, in Port Arthur.


This courthouse is one of the many public works projects courthouses Built during the Great Depression.  As the sign for the courthouse notes, it was built in 1935 and 1936, at time during which the fortunes of Port Arthur frankly look to have been better than they currently are.

Monday, September 19, 2016

Monday at the Bar: Courthouses of the West: Frank E. Moss Federal Courthouse and United States Courthouse for the District of Utah

Courthouses of the West: Frank E. Moss Federal Courthouse and United States Courthouse for the District of Utah, Salt Lake City.



Built in 1931, the last year of the Hoover Administration, this classic courthouse is nestled in downtown Salt Lake City.   The current name is much more recent, coming from a long serving Utah Senator who retired in 1977.

Just behind this classic revival style courthouse is a large modern office building which is the current United States Courthouse for the District of Utah, which has the local nickname of the "Borg Cube" due to its modern architecture, and in obvious reference to the characters from Star Trek.  That also forms a fairly effective commentary on what the public thinks of modern style courthouses, so I don't need to add to that, and could hardly do so more effectively.

Detail from the Frank E. Moss Courthouse
While most of the court's functions have moved to the new courthouse, the old one continues to house the bankruptcy court.